Marc Charisse: Changes coming to eveningsun.com

Asked about the secret of great sculpture, Michelangelo is supposed to have said, "I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free."

I used to think that notion of art as removing the superfluous was just a snarky comment from an old master whose real creative processes remained a mystery, maybe even to himself.

But as I get older, I think I see the angel in the stone. Michelangelo's wisdom says something to me, too, about our own communication "art" - the creation of good journalism in these seemingly chaotic digital times.

Like a sculptor, the reporter picks from quotes and context and pages of facts to fashion a story. Editors have the thankless task of narrowing the news even further from the incomprehensible cacophony of a day's events. We chip away at the less important to decide what belongs in the viewer in a given hour or on the front page in a given day. That might be a recipe for art, bit it's also a prescription for bias, intentional and otherwise. So it's a good thing there are so many sources of information out there these days. Maybe it keeps us all little more honest.

But it also makes it harder to sort the angels from the exponentially expanding boulders of information out there in this digital age. Too many websites, too many headlines, too many blind online alleys that lead nowhere.

People say that's killing us newspapers, but I think that's good for newsrooms weaned on print traditions - helping you find the information you want and need has always been the art of putting out a newspaper.

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And it informs the website changes the company will be rolling out.

We may not be Michelangelos, but I hope you'll like the changes on our website when they launch Wednesday. The guiding philosophy has been cutting away the clutter to make the news you want easier to find and easier to read and watch. That's probably as close as I'll ever get to art, though of course I'm not the one who actually suffered on the scaffold to build the new site.

That credit goes to journalists and IT folks across Digital First Media, and it is part of a redesign of our newspaper websites nationwide. And the latest art and science of what makes a great news website has been applied to make all of our websites as fast, efficient and user-friendly as they can be. The menus and pages have been redesigned, typefaces updated and enlarged so that you can navigate to the rich content on our websites: local issues, local teams, court records, crime news, community columnists and all the news, images and commentary from around here and around the world, as it happens.

I hope the changes speak for themselves, and you explore the redesigned site more in the weeks to come. But if you have questions or comments, please let me know.

You'll also be seeing changes to our print design in the weeks ahead as we take advantage of our national reach as a company. Newspapers across Digital First Media will share typefaces and design conventions to increase the efficiency of producing multiple newspapers. Efforts like GameTimePA.com and our Gettysburg anniversary coverage have shown us how much more effective we can be in news coverage when we share our resources across the region and nation.

The core mission of The Evening Sun, of course, will always be to cover the news closest to home, the news that matters most right around here. And in these days of tight print budgets, mastering the art of cutting through the clutter to what matters most. Increasingly the news in print will be information really worth hanging on to, carved in stone, as it where. The stories you might clip for a scrapbook or hang on your refrigerator, if not in a frame on the wall.

Online news, on the other hand, will focus on the immediate, especially on our phone and tablet apps, while our websites will serve to organize and arrange the more timeless as well as the trendy.

Like I say, I don't fancy myself a Michelangelo. But I like to think there's an art to what we do, and that I have an artist's passion for doing it better.

Those new canvases you'll be seeing online and in print will keep us aiming higher, even if it's not all the way up to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

What can you expect?

Viewers of eveningsun.com will find: Larger photos and type, the popular Media Center photograph galleries are easier to find, home page and section home pages are more easily scanned, the most significant stories, photos and videos of the moment can be more immediately found.

Marc Charisse is the editor of The Evening Sun. Email mcharisse@eveningsun.com. Twitter: @esmcharisse

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